What’s the difference between Virtual Earth and MapPoint Web Service?
From http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/faq.mspx:
Q. What happened to the MapPoint Web Service? What is the difference between the Virtual Earth platform and MapPoint Web Service?
A. The Virtual Earth platform encompasses the next evolution of the MapPoint Web Service offering with innovative new capabilities. The Virtual Earth platform is not only a new brand name; it represents a richer, more powerful offering from Microsoft to companies of all industries. Developers have the flexibility of tapping into one of the two Virtual Earth application programming interfaces (API): MapPoint Web Service API using SOAP XML to communicate with customer applications and Virtual Earth Map Control that lets users make request via JavaScript to an AJAX map object.
Here are some quick comparisons:
|
|
Virtual Earth |
MapPoint Web Service |
|
Map Styles |
Road, Aerial, Birds eye |
Over 30 different styles (optimised schemes for night viewing, etc) however no aerial imagery |
|
Integration style |
JS control (best for embedding in web pages) |
SOAP web service (usable anywhere) |
|
Interface style |
Drag and drop positioning, scroll wheel support, interactive pushpins, AJAX based. |
Roll your own (it returns an image and you have to work out what to do with it). |
|
Pushpin support |
You create them all yourself on the fly using API calls – any clustering / filtering optimizations have to be done manually. |
Can upload pushpin sets to their databases and they will handle plotting / clustering and filtering. |
|
Routes |
Specify a start point and an end point and they’ll give you a route in text. End of story. |
Specify the waypoints, preferred road styles (back roads, highways, toll roads, non-toll roads) and it will return a machine readable result set. |
|
Cost |
Free (commercial use has some minor restrictions) |
Per transaction |
|
SDK documentation and support |
Basic MSDN docs, active community (www.viavirtualearth.com) |
Plenty of MSDN docs and articles, including VS.NET integrated help and plenty of websites (www.mp2kmag.com) |
[...] Difference between Virtual Earth and MapPoint Web Service Tatham Oddie prepared a table outlining the differences between Virtual Earth platform and the MapPoint Web Service — Map Styles Virtual Earth: Road, Aerial, Birds eye MapPoint Web Service: Over 30 different styles (optimised schemes for night viewing, etc) however no aerial imagery Integration style Virtual Earth: JS control (best for embedding in web pages) MapPoint Web Service: SOAP web service (usable anywhere) View the full summary — What’s the difference between Virtual Earth and MapPoint Web Service? [...]
Difference between Virtual Earth and MapPoint Web Service - MapPoint Forums
October 30, 2006 at 01:02
Differences Between Virtual Earth and MapPoint Web Service
The Via Virtual Earth blog links to a Tatham entry shortly describing t
Slashgeo
November 15, 2006 at 16:36
Very good information!!!
I got what i want in short & sweet way!!!
Thanks a lot
sucheta
March 19, 2008 at 18:23
Very important information in short & sweet way!!!
I got wht i was searching for!!
Thanks
sucheta
March 19, 2008 at 18:26
Thanks ….this is great…i am searching for that difference 2 weeks ago
joe
March 22, 2008 at 14:52
I have been going in circles tyring to understand difference using MSDN. Sometimes teams within MS dont talk to each other or simply dont connect the dots!
THanks for the highlighting the differences!
Ravi
July 17, 2008 at 07:00